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Hot Orange Sauce for Ice Cream

A hot orange sauce made with orange juice, lemon juice, sugar, and corn starch, served over ice cream.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 5 ingredients
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Why it works: Orange and lemon match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 10,634 recipes. Both carry 3-hexenal, which smells apple, fruity. The science ↓

Hot Orange Sauce for Ice Cream

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Dissolve corn starch in a little cold water.

  2. Mix orange juice, lemon juice, and sugar in a saucepan.

Make the sauce

  1. Add the dissolved corn starch to the mixture.

  2. Cook over medium heat until it thickens into a syrup.

  3. Strain the sauce and serve hot or cold.

Recipe from a historical cookbook (Internet Archive).

Transcribed from a scanned cookbook and modernised for today's kitchens. Where the book gave no heat or time, or said "a moderate oven", the temperatures and times here may be modern equivalents rather than the book's own figures.

Explore the science

The flavor team

The pairs that carry this dish. Each one is judged two ways: how much their aromas overlap, and how often cooks already put them together.

  1. Orange + lemontop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together10,634 recipes

    Shared aroma: 3-hexenal (apple, fruity).

  2. Orange + corntop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together586 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,4-decadienal (seaweed).

  3. Lemon + corntop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,927 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-nonenal (fatty, green).

  4. Lemon + sugartop 18% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together53,532 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-nonenal (fatty, green).

  5. Orange + sugartop 20% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together19,212 recipes

    Shared aroma: beta-damascenone (apple, rose).

Lemon and sugar barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 53,532 recipes: they work on texture and structure more than aroma.

Ranks compare each pair with 20,000 random ingredient pairs on CompKitchen. How we score pairs

What each ingredient does

Corn starch
Thickens the juice mixture as it heats, giving the sauce body.
Sugar
Adds sweetness and helps give the sauce its syrupy consistency.
Orange juice
Provides the main citrus flavour and most of the liquid in the sauce.
Lemon juice
Adds acidity that brightens the sweetness and orange flavour.

The step that matters

Cook until it thickens. Corn starch only thickens once the mixture reaches a simmer and its starch granules swell and gelatinise. Stopping early leaves the sauce thin, while overcooking can make it gluey, so watch for it to coat a spoon.

Swap the lemon

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (orange, corn, sugar):

  1. Vanillafits better
  2. Lemonthe original
  3. Limefits about as well
  4. Figfits about as well

Fit is the average pairing score against orange, corn, sugar. Candidates are from the same food group and used in at least 100 recipes.

“What each ingredient does” and “The step that matters” were written by Claude from this recipe’s own method and reviewed in samples by CompKitchen.

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